Now Available: Film Sample Project

With so much momentum around real-time filmmaking, we know many of you are eager to try creating cinematic scenes with the latest best practices for fast iteration and powerful storytelling workflows. For users looking to get started using Unity for linear content such as cut-scenes for their games, short films, or other use cases, we published a Film Sample Project on the Asset Store.

Mike Wuetherick is a Senior Producer on the Made with Unity team. His team has worked on a number of large cinematic projects over the past 2 years, including the Oats Studios ADAM Episode 2 & 3 shorts, and most recently the Baymax Dreams collaboration with Disney Television Animation.

Introducing the Unity Film Sample Project

This package contains an example Unity project preconfigured for anyone interested in creating linear content, such as short films or even an animated series. It uses layout tips from how projects like Adam 2: The Mirror and Baymax Dreams shorts were created, and also serves as a starting point for creating your own cinematic project in Unity.

The project uses the new HD Scriptable Render Pipeline, Post Processing Stack V2, Timeline, Cinemachine and includes a number of additional editor utilities, custom timeline tracks, and other useful tools that we’ve built while working on linear productions with Unity.

In order to get started with the Film Sample, you’re going to need a copy of Unity installed. This project was created with Unity 2018.2, and it should work with any 2018.2.x or 2018.3.x version of Unity.

Once you have Unity installed, create a new Empty project using the High-Definition RP template, and then navigate to the asset store and import the Film Sample project.

Note: the Film Sample is a complete Unity project, which means that it should be imported into an empty project.

What is included

The package includes:

Basic project structure and organization, including a custom Unity editor window layout designed specifically for working on linear productions (for example, Timeline window is visible by default).

Base directory structures for: content, scenes, timelines

Library of tools, timeline extensions and other goodies that we have created and found to be useful for episodic production, check under the Tools menu

A sample short containing 3 shots from the Oats Studios short Adam 2: The Mirror, including:

ADAM Character: Created by Unity’s Demo team

WASP Character: Created by Unity’s Demo team (as «Lu»)

Traption Guard Character: Created by Oats Studios, based on the Adam Character by Unity’s Demo team

Original mocap camera movements from the short

Note: the three characters are provided with rigs modified by Oats Studios for the Adam Ep.2 and Ep.3 shorts, based on the version previously released in the ADAM 1 Character pack by Unity’s Demo team, which uses the Unity Humanoid Rig.

An Empty Series set of scenes & timelines designed to be used as the starting point for a new episodic series

Credits

The Airlock environment assets were created by Virtuous Games for Oats Studios, and the Motion Capture was shot at Animatrik studios.

The characters, content, and scenes are from the Adam 2: asset pack, and are copyright Unity Technologies, Aps.

Walkthrough

Content Organization

All of the content for the Film Sample project is organized using a specific folder structure, shown below. It is recommended that you organize your content similarly.

The section below will describe how to configure the scene framework for your own projects.

Content

All 3d models, animations, characters, props, audio etc are located under this folder.

Scenes

Includes the scenes for the samples & tutorials.

Timeline

Includes the Timeline sequences for the sample episodes.

Getting Started with the Film Sample

The Film Sample includes 2 sample scenes for you to use, as well as a number of tutorial scenes that demonstrate specific concepts in Timeline and Cinemachine for you to use in your own productions.

The first sample scene is pre-built and uses some of the assets from the ADAM Episode 2 short to show how you can organize your content, Unity Scenes and Timeline to create your own production.

The second sample scene is an empty scene with pre-created Timeline sequences, designed for you to start building your own sequences from scratch!

To load the sample scenes, navigate to the Scenes folder in the Unity project.

As shown in the screenshot below, you will see a number of folders under Scenes. The sample scenes are located in the EmptySeries and FilmSampleV1 folders.

If you open the Film Sample V1 sample scene you will be presented with the setup shown in the header image at the top of the blog. This sample includes three shots from ADAM: Episode 2, and demonstrates using Timeline with Nested Timelines, as well as a couple different ways to approach creating cameras for your shorts — one with only Cinemachine, and one that shows the original mocap cameras that were created by Oats for the original shorts.

If you navigate to the Scenes/EmptySeries folder, you will find a corresponding scene for the Empty example. You can use this sample as the starting point for creating your own custom production!

The Film Sample includes many other tools, custom Timeline tracks, editor shortcuts and other utilities designed to make creating linear productions like ADAM easier. Check the FilmSample Readme file included in the project for more information.

Find out more

This video tutorial guides you through the full workflow of recreating the Film Sample V1 scene from scratch. This will give you the knowledge you need on the workflows and Unity tools that will enable you to create your cinematic content.

This mentioned Unity Analytics are needed. I made a new empty project without analytics and I got some errors. Then I greated empty project with analytics included then everything worked fine. So somehow Analytics module is required.

I’ll see what I can do for the undo support on the tools. This is a library that we’ve been building up (and continue to work on for our own projects) over the past few years, strangely enough no one has ever mentioned lack of undo before ;}

I’ll do a pass on the animations, definitely a great point about the compression — definitely something that you want to disable for the majority of productions like this (we definitely did for both ADAM and Baymax Dreams). Animators are picky about this sort of thing ;}